Casey’s Past Told Us the ‘Fixer’ Would Get Us Into a Fix

They called him “Cyclone” when he was growing up in the 1920s on Long Island--a shrewd, energetic kid figuring all the angles and clearly on the make. Now, six decades later, the summer after his death, William Joseph Casey is still at the center of a storm.

In the wake of the Iran- contra hearings the former CIA director turns out to be the man who knew it all, the architect and the mover of the whole shady scheme to ransom hostages with guns and to rake the profits for outlaw aid to a war in Central America, the dead man who will tell no tales. And there is reason to ask, even if he is not here to testify, what his life has to tell us about it all.

He was a fatherless boy, the grandson of an Irish immigrant, who grew up in Queens and worked his way through Fordham and St. John’s Law School during the Depression, in part by investigating welfare applicants. Before he was 40, Bill Casey was a millionaire lawyer and investor, and seemed settled into a kind of businessman’s banality. “With his gray hair and lined face,” one observer thought, “he strikes the casual eye as a tired executive on the last commuter train home.” Yet there was something more beneath the pin-striped suits; with Casey, a man who prided himself on being on the “inside,” one always had to look beyond the surface appearance. And those who knew the story were not surprised at what happened later.

During World War II he had eagerly joined the Office of Strategic Services, the dashing forerunner of the CIA. There he was a parvenu Irishman amid the Ivy League gentlemen who dominated our fledgling spy agency. But he rose, as always, by hard work and a canny, practical intelligence. As aide to the courtly David K. E. Bruce, Casey coordinated OSS relations with the French Resistance at the Normandy invasion, and later, at the close of the war, became the chief of European operations for the agency. From the beginning there were troubling questions about the quality and substance of his work--flaws in the OSS liaison that cost the Maquis needless casualties, or the sordid role of U.S. intelligence in aiding Nazi war criminals. But only a handful of discreet insiders knew anything about that at the moment, and the awkward history would remain long buried.

After the war, Casey worked for a time in the Marshall Plan bureaucracy and then went back to his real love and forte, making money. His own investments were clever and profitable, but Casey’s fame in the New York financial world traced more to his prolific publishing. One of the first and most successful of the “how to” money authors, he wrote or edited more than 30 desk books and manuals in the 1950s and ‘60s. That, too, is a clue to what followed. Consider the more prominent works: “Tax Planning on Excess Profits,” “How to Raise Money to Make Money,” “How to Build and Preserve Executive Wealth,” “How Federal Tax Angles Multiply Real Estate Profits.”

Casey was ever the fixer, preferably a secret fixer, quietly behind the scenes where things could be done without noisome regulations or publicity. His real political patron was not Ronald Reagan but Richard M. Nixon, for whom he was a shadowy fund-raiser and go-between as far back as the Eisenhower Administration. His specialty for the then-vice president was the care and feeding of friendly biographers and the chilling of critics. Casey found a home with Nixon’s new methods that came after the 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy and the 1962 gubernatorial defeat in California. It was a heady, can-do politics, and, like Casey’s business practices, on the murky margin of moral and legal standards.

In 1968 Casey was quietly collecting money for Nixon’s presidential campaign, and a year later gained his first Washington prominence as the founder and chairman of the Citizens Committee for Peace and Security--a White House-inspired lobby for the anti-ballistic-missile program that stirred controversy when 55 of its 344 citizen backers turned out to be denizens of the defense industry.

In 1971 Casey was rewarded by Nixon with the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where the thrust of his policies would be to ease and dilute the commission’s hard-won policing of the stock markets. The legacy would be felt in part in the scandals that eventually rocked Wall Street in the 1980s.

He was gone from government briefly, after Watergate and the defeat of Gerald R. Ford, but back more powerfully than even as Reagan’s campaign manager in 1980, and promptly then embroiled in “debategate,” the election episode in which even Reagan insiders accused Casey of stealing Jimmy Carter’s briefing book before the presidential debates.

A grateful and impressed Reagan named Casey to head the CIA in 1981, and inside the regime he seemed a formidable and successful chief. The first director to be given full Cabinet rank, he hired back the agency’s old boys who had been fired during the Carter years, pumped up the CIA budget to more than $3 billion among an unprecedented $24 billion for intelligence overall, and in secret wars from Central America to Afghanistan seemed to restore the spy establishment to its former glory and more.

Even then there was always something nagging and nasty. To head clandestine operations, Casey named Max Hugel, a political friend and businessman with no real experience in intelligence or foreign policy. Hugel was forced to resign in the resulting furor. There was also a mounting list of intelligence failures by Casey’s richly funded apparatus--a blindness in Lebanon, a surprising new regime in Grenada, a nuclear accident at Chernobyl that we learned about only from the Swedes, Soviet spies at the heart of the CIA and the crucial National Security Agency, the perplexing defection and then re-defection of Soviet KGB operative Vitaly Yurchenko.

All over Washington (though rarely reported to the rest of the nation) there were marks of Casey’s imperious manner. At an OSS reunion, when a former World War II colleague questioned his handling of the Yurchenko affair, Casey was heard savagely calling the old friend a “selfish bastard” and “publicity seeker.”

In his heyday Casey made frequent telephone calls to Washington newspapers--many of the calls successful--to kill stories that would be embarrassing to the CIA. And inside the huge agency headquarters in suburban Virginia, intelligence was increasingly made to the director’s order. “This is a bunch of crap,” he reportedly scratched across an analysis of conditions in Mexico, and a senior agency expert on Latin America quit because Casey was shading the findings to suit Reagan policy goals in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

It was all--from beginning to end--an obvious prologue to the Iran- contra disgrace, the unmistakable resume of a man whose wanton ignorance of the world, whose penchant for the quick fix and the back-room deal were exceeded only by his contempt for the inconveniences of democracy.

The real fault, however, was not in Bill Casey, who was what he was from Queens to Langley, but in a political system that heedlessly, recklessly let him go so far on such a plain and predictable record.

It is unseemly, it is true, to speak of the departed so bluntly, but even more so to ignore the lessons of a public life, especially when so many other lives may depend on the wisdom.

R.I.P., William Casey, living legend to Oliver North and others, practitioner of the silent wars and arrangements of another era. You were, they say, the last of a breed. And let us hope, too, the last example of a great nation’s foreign policy conducted like a shady speculation on some black market.